Along with popularity of mobile devices and increase of Internet multimedia content, people have more diversified and personalized channels to conduct media viewing and hearing activities, which causes a great challenge to TV industry. It seems that a TV set played a role of information and entertainment center in the past gradually loses a position of media center and entertainment platform, but it actually does not. According to investigation of a research institute TNS (Taylor Nelson Sofres), people all over the world still have the habit to watch TV. However, due to development of network media and handheld electronic devices, users also use mobile phones or tablets to search or receive information while watching TV, such that a “screen-stacking” phenomenon is occurred.
The TNS performs a survey on more than 55,000 global respondents, and a result shows that each modern people averagely owns four digital devices, and the respondents in Hong Kong, Australia and the UK even own five digital devices averagely. Moreover, due to the demand of the audience on TV and a demand of viewing video content at anytime anywhere, it promotes arising of a viewing pattern of “multi-screen viewing” or “screen-stacking” (i.e. the user simultaneously uses a plurality of digital devices). The survey of the TNS also found that nearly a half of the respondents (48%) also use other electronic devices while watching TV during the night, for example, to use social media, check E-mails or conduct Internet shopping, etc. 72% of the respondents may use “multi-screen” while watching TV, and many of them comment on the program, the game, the performance on the social media at the same time, and such phenomenon have become a norm worldwide.
Therefore, manufacturers develop Internet TVs or smart TVs to satisfy such demand. However, the practitioners also discover that more than 40% of the users only browse TV programs through the smart TVs, and do not use other functions (such as to use social software, browse WebPages or use communication software, etc.) except for watching TV on the smart TV. A national purchase diary (NPD) conducts a related survey and provides a report, which shows that no more than 15% of the users owning the smart TVs in home may use the smart TVs to implement other functions besides watching TV programs, such as to listen to music, browse websites, or conduct Internet shopping, etc., and a main reason thereof is that an interface of the smart TV is too complicated, and related applications are not specially designed for the TV platform. Moreover, the other devices of the user (for example, a tablet PC, a smart phone, a laptop computer, etc.) already have the same functions, and operation interfaces and operation experiences of the above devices are superior than that of the smart TV. In addition, lack of high quality content and poor operation experience are also the reasons why the users do not use over the top (OTT) services. The OTT services are services provided by related practitioners through a network, for example, services such as audio and video media, E-mail communication, message transmission, etc. Therefore, in a situation that the operation experiences of the products sold in the market are generally poor, the users are hard to obey an originally designed service flow to conduct operations, such that expected purposes and effects of the smart TVs are hard to be achieved.
According to the above analysis, the existing TV usage pattern is still based on a single content source and a single layer display. When a user wants to get information other than the TV channel content or get information services provided by an OTT practitioner, it is hard to get the information through a same frame at the same time, and the user has to use extra devices (for example, a PC, a handheld device, etc.) to get the above information by himself. Moreover, if the TV itself provides the Internet accessing function or an external smart TV stick is equipped, the user has to use two or more remote controllers to manually switch a TV source in order to receive the external information. In addition, the above situation depends on operations conducted by the user when the user needs external information, and most of the TV sets do not have a mechanism for automatically providing notifications and delivering messages.